Myanmar’s Rohingya Refugees Are The World’s Largest Group of Stateless People

More than 500 Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladesh took shelter in Seunuddon after coming ashore on Sumatra island in Indonesia on Monday.

Junaidi Hanafiah / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images

More than 1,500 Rohingya Muslim and Bangladeshi refugees have landed in Indonesia and Malaysia since Sunday. Seven thousand more are estimated to still be on the oceans, fleeing Myanmar. If these groups of refugees are turned back, it’s not clear where the Rohingya will be sent, because they are considered stateless. In fact, they are the largest group of stateless people in the world.

Rohingya residents of Myanmar are not citizens of their own nation. In 1982, Myanmar’s citizenship law classified all Rohingya as immigrants from Bangladesh, regardless of where they were born or how long their families had lived in Myanmar. The Muslim Rohingya are an ethnic minority in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar. During territorial disputes, the Rohingya have favored autonomy for themselves or, in the 1940s, absorption into the former East Pakistan.

The United Nations estimates that Myanmar has relegated over a million Rohingya to the status of stateless people — they constitute 10 percent of all stateless people in the world.